Elucidations

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

The object of these 'elucidations' by the renowned theologian Balthasar is to offer a concise and summary treatment of a few essential questions concerning the substance of the Christian life, experience, and faith, which today are in dispute or-as is true of many-are disappearing into oblivion. Each chapter stands on its own. Together they bear witness to an underlying comprehensive vision; they are a few rays which all radiate from the same center. Among the some twenty-five chapters/topics Balthasar covers are "The Personal God", "The Marian Principle", "Authority and Tradition", "Unmodern Prayer", "The Pope Today", and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681491523

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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Preface

The object of these elucidations is to offer a concise and summary treatment of a few essential questions concerning the substance of the Christian life, experience, and faith, which today are in dispute or—as is true of the majority—are disappearing into oblivion. Each chapter stands on its own; the order is of no importance. Together they bear witness to an underlying view of things; they are a few rays which all radiate from the same center. Much which today arouses passion remains untreated, not because one is afraid to get involved at close quarters, preferring to take his stand behind less dangerous positions, but for a variety of reasons. In some cases the question would require a more detailed treatment; in others it could only be decided by a positive decision of the Church; in yet others it has only been artificially turned into a burning problem and that perhaps because one avoids the true burning center oneself. It is often the case that what fires me, the lukewarm Christian, does not touch the one who is truly afire, and what nearly destroys the latter does not disturb me in any manner.

If these few rays do indeed proceed from the true sun, then perhaps one could on that basis calculate the center of the fire from which our questions would be shown to be truly burning and often would nearly be solved. Much, however, which seemed to me simple and unquestionable could perhaps, unheeded, turn itself into a question mark.

Much is offered in a concentrated form. Those who find pieces like Trinity and Future or Christianity as Utopia too compressed should pass them over. There are, however, many things which become clearer by compression. I would ask you, then, not simply to read over difficult passages but to resolve them in subsequent reflection. There is much which overlaps, but one should exercise patience, for there are Christian things which only come home to one through repetition.

Certain problems today are given excessive publicity; men try to exalt them by force into articles by which the Church stands or falls. They are practically all problems which men try to solve by smoothing over or playing down the difficulties, by suggesting, supposedly out of sympathy for men’s needs, the easier way. And yet in the long run it is the narrow way which attracts the best men. It is, for example, well known that monasteries which have preserved the strictness of their discipline undiminished today still have new postulants, whereas those who prefer a softer line seem to be despised by God and men. That is only intended to be taken as a symptom. The one who makes demands (but he must also give evidence that he has much to offer and must only make his demands for God and his work) still has a chance of being heard. It is part of the definition of fashion that it will change next year. That which is truly Christian was fortunately never fashionable, not even in the so-called Christian ages.

What little is said here is without pretension. One can only wonder, when reading many present-day books, how much expertise and skill have been squandered on unfruitful matters. But then one may draw comfort from Hofmannsthal’s dictum, the most dangerous sort of stupidity is a sharp understanding. So one can accept it happily enough if one is thought of as simple and a little weak-minded.

A Verse of Matthias Claudius

If someone receives a present from a friend, what should he then not do? There are a hundred ways of saying the wrong thing, and so it is best to get it right straightaway. Thank you! It makes me very happy! I am so pleased to have it! I think it’s beautiful! It will remind me of you! Then the recipient too causes joy and happiness. Nothing could be simpler than that, and without question it is right.

If, however, one departs from this simplicity and begins to divide what is indivisible, then it is remarkable what a variety of false reactions can be discovered and developed. In the first place, one can pretend not to want it: Oh, that’s much too beautiful for me, and far too good for me. I’d much prefer you to have it, won’t you take it back and use it yourself? You’ve got a much better safe and I might lose it. And my taste is much poorer than yours. You’re surely a much better judge of its value than I am. Or one might sound a note of mistrust: Why on earth did he give that to me? What’s behind it? Does he want to make me feel indebted to him? Is he trying to entangle me with his presents? Or does he want to humiliate me, because he knows that I can’t give him anything of equivalent worth in return? How difficult it is to be so indebted without being able to make adequate return! We can, however, try to get rid of this rather oppressive sense of obligation by indulging in more fantastic speculations: What if the present doesn’t come from him at all? If someone or other has sent it under a false name in order to play me a malicious trick and will die laughing when he gets my moving letter of thanks? I must first examine the matter thoroughly and find out who really has sent it. One can also subject the present to a really thorough examination. Is it really genuine? Is it silver or plate or merely a cheap imitation? Is it an original or mass-produced? Has it been cast in one piece, or has it been stuck together? And if the latter, from how many parts and elements? Then one breaks up the thing into its individual components, and in this state it no longer looks like anything at all and only confirms one’s suspicion. If one looks at the matter more closely, more soberly, more critically, then the whole thing (but now, of course, it is not a whole thing any longer) is revealed as a fraud. I wonder what he paid for it? At first sight it gave the impression—as was, of course, intended—of being a very valuable, indeed almost priceless, piece. It was intended to create such a belief and that such belief should lead to a corresponding gratitude. One can see the intention. But something simpler would have rung more true. Next time I go shopping I will take the piece along and go into a few shops and ask how much they are worth. Unfortunately, probably very little. I can’t sell it back. But at least I can work out how much the giver has been prepared to lay out on me. And then, at last, I will find out what his loudly proclaimed love is really worth.

     Do you see there stands the moon?—

     It is but half in view,

     And yet is round and beautiful!

     So too are many things

     We lightly laugh to scorn,

     Because our eyes fail to see. (Matthias Claudius)

The criticism of Christianity is a highly exasperating matter. The nearer one gets to the details, the stronger the lens one takes to examine them, the more incredibly banal and cheap everything appears. And yet criticism is such an invaluable instrument, indeed the most reliable which God (or God-nature) has given to us men that we might work our way up from a state of primitive humanity to the highest state of the superman. As soon as any of the accepted criticism of our day is labelled uncritical, then it is simply out of date. If you can prove that a professor has accepted something uncritically, he will have forfeited a large measure of the brightness of his halo.

Now it is a fact that that which is truly Christian only comes in view when it is accepted. Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you. And so we are brought back to the beginning. There is only one proper way of receiving a present—if indeed it is a present at all. That is the uncritical way. Then everything is round and beautiful. It is in truth a present if it mediates the immediacy of love to love. For a moment a ray bursts forth and bears witness to the light which endures. The character of the present is as such not uppermost, not the real subject; it only points to the heart of the one who gives and appeals to the heart of the one who receives. It makes a genuine appeal, in an act of trust. It wants not to be misunderstood as a present, to possess no value of its own, only to be grasped as a sign of love. It does not wish to put a burden on the receiver. For the lover the best thing would be if he did not need to make his offering in the form of a present but could give his love itself this form so that he could visibly lay it in the hands of die loved one. Then, indeed, everything would be so transparent that there would be no need to look behind it, because then the wholeness (the catholicity) of love would have been portrayed in the wholeness of the present as in a crystal. This wholeness could, of course, only be perceived by those who know how to see things whole and only be received by a heart which is itself whole. One can see already that critical Catholicism is a contradiction in terms.

For the first thing about Christianity is that it is a gift of God to men, and, because God is not a mean giver, it is the most beautiful gift possible. Only the man who accepts it in the manner in which it is given will not lightly laugh it to scorn. See, I proclaim to you a great joy. The man who listens to that in a critically morose and mistrusting frame of mind will naturally be no more ready to hear the proclamation of great joy than to receive the gift which would bring such joy. If one does indeed want to use the word critical—and perhaps one only means by that appropriate—then the only critical attitude to this gift would be a lightness of heart which, without reflecting about itself, says thank you. And this all the more so because, according to the Christian message, the gift which is offered is indeed truly the crystallized (and at the same time liquefied) love of the giver: God in the form of his given-ness. There is only one man who may receive such a present as it is intended: he who himself is transformed into the form of given-ness, conformed to it by virtue of his own whole-hearted assent, thanks, and acceptance.

And so, incidentally, we have reached our goal. The process of purifying, and consequently of elucidating, clarifying, our troubled and infested Christian effluent can be nothing else than that of converting it back into the pure transparent whole. Not, that is, its detailed microscopic examination and treatment with chemical ingredients. For the cloudiness and discoloration all come from the fact that certain problems relating only to partial aspects of Christianity have been taken out of their context within the whole and treated critically on their own, whereas they can receive meaning and gain their proper form and exhaustive treatment only through integration into the whole and by being plotted out in relation to the overall unity. We are becoming submerged in a superfluity of such partial problems; as such they are becoming more and more confused; each receives for itself a leaden weight which makes it weigh more than the united whole. Not only does one no longer see the whole in its external appearance—that is not surprising—but also one no longer sees it in its inner essence, and so whole peoples and continents emigrate from a lost inner essence toward an undiscoverable outward appearance. Men rack their brains and at the same time threaten to beat each other’s out over the structural problems of the Church, as if the Church were in any sense a structure alone and not rather in her essence the transparent gift which God gives us of himself, long before it becomes our answer, which is appropriate only when it gives expression to the assent and thanksgiving and amen of love. We can gaze as intensely as we will at individual structures and examine them from all sides critically, but we shall still totally fail to understand them if we do not grasp them as that which they are of themselves: because our eyes fail to see.

There are here and there Christians whom one calls saints (they do not all turn out equally well). They allow us to see in their existence, as it were in a small model, what the large model of Christianity truly means. They are the best clarifiers there are in the Church. They are transparent to the whole, the gift of God to us. Their whole lives are lived out of this gift, are an attempt to respond to it in gratitude. It makes such total demands on them that for them there is neither time nor place for critical reflection from a neutral standpoint. At least they know so much of God that they constantly trust him to perform the greatest work, which is also the most difficult and most beautiful, and consequently from the start they sense falsehood wherever there is any attempt to chip away at the substance of Christianity, to reduce it or to equate it with other philosophies. It is this vision, this way of looking at things and this way of thinking common to the saints that we wish at least to take as our guide in what follows.

This will doubtless disappoint many expectations. In the first place, one will be able constantly to offer as an objection to the method that it presupposes in every case what ought to be proved—if of course one can in any way ever prove a whole, for that is something which seems beyond the reach of critical reason, something which it can only approach (or alternatively move away from) asymptotically by treatment of individual aspects. To continue to presuppose the existence of the whole and to attempt to resolve all the obscurities of the individual problems simply by letting every river run out into the sea seems offensive in view of the efforts which are being made on so many sides today, and ultimately it seems to clarify nothing. But we must also at this time put this objection to one side. For in these little essays we shall be following no other method than that which has been used from time immemorial, namely, that of starting by seeing and weighing and recognizing the whole.

Second, everything will remain quite fragmentary and unsystematic. If one tried with every cut to bisect the center of an apple, how many such cuts would be possible? The question shows that the answer is irrelevant. The important thing is to prove that one can in every case, as often as one likes, really hit the middle. Once one has grasped the principle by being shown a few examples, then one can do it oneself. In what sense can one speak of systematics with reference to a divine gift? In order to achieve a system (which means precisely a placing together), one would have to start from the horizontal inter-relationship of the parts and so to proceed from below gradually to construct or, indeed, to reconstruct the whole. But that is impossible precisely because God’s gift as a whole is reached only from above. And so I ask the reader not to attempt to find an internal and consecutive relationship between these sketches. There is no such thing. Everything is related only by reference to the center.

Third and worst. We cannot afford, if we are concerned with God’s gift to us, to think toward God from the point of view of man, particularly from the point of view of modern man. We must not think from the point of view of what we need; of that to which the gift would most reasonably have to adjust itself; of what we still believe and can reasonably answer for; and of what can no longer be demanded of us critical and enlightened men. With such a priori postulates we shall indeed make it precisely impossible for ourselves to distinguish between the kernel and the husk, between historical wrapping and the eternal valid content, and then it happens that we by mistake throw away the kernel with the husks and are simply left with husks. If we take a single passage of the Bible, then criticism can ask what it means in a historical, in a national, in a Near Eastern context, can ask from what sources it comes, what outlook and views it presupposes in the speaker, the writer, and the hearer. All that is well and good. But there simply are no single passages of the Bible, but only a total complex which is the event of revelation, which through the centuries has used very many words in order to say one thing from many sides and points of view. The meaning of a word in a sentence or a paragraph depends in each case on the context. Everybody knows that. The relative importance of a phase in the development of New Testament Christology is decided by the synthesis within which it is integrated. Now unfortunately not everybody considers this. The final, definitive meaning of a dogma which the Church has on occasion defined is decided by her total understanding of revelation, which is expressed in the particular statements but which also transcends them. The standpoint from which one views something, from which one attempts to cast light on it, can change, precisely because the object around which one moves is always the same. In order that critical reason may begin to get to work on this object at all, one thing is necessary: namely, that it first gets it in its sights (instead of always first thinking of itself) and then, when it has seen, asks itself with what method one can approach it in order to do justice to it. This is the manner of approach in every science which has pretensions to respectability. Again, in this case the whole has priority over the part, and it is from the whole that the part is to be understood and elucidated; again and again we return to the same point.

Not, of course, as if all questions which press on us today can be solved by the magic means of integration. And yet a clarification, where possible, can only be hoped for if we attempt to answer questions by thinking them out from their center and, as it were, thus decontaminating them. The center does not offer any oracles which would absolve us from the task of understanding; and, of course, individual questions within the context of the whole may always be treated quite separately, according to the context within which they are placed. Is polygenism theologically assimilable? How far is intercommunion to be encouraged ecclesiastically or to be forbidden? What legal arrangements are to be made in the question of mixed marriages? What is the precise meaning of the sacrament of holy orders? Such and a hundred other similar questions demand extensive investigation, the weighing up of the advantages and disadvantages of many different points of view. But whence can we expect clarifying light to be shed on such problems if not from the total meaning of the Christian revelation? It is before this light, and not primarily before the light of reason or of humanity, that one will have to answer for the decisions which one makes. This demands of all who take part in the discussion the ability to hold in view contemplatively the whole and not the half moon: a contemplative ability. Questions which embrace the immense space between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and grace, cannot be clarified from purely earthly and natural points of view. One can see this best if one tries the alternative approach. How insoluble such problems then seem and indeed are in the restricted space which is allowed to them, if one honestly allows them to retain all their questionableness and does not instead violently explain them away.

We cannot hope in the following pieces to arouse the contemplative sense in men, but merely, where it is present, to encourage its exercise a little. And, perhaps, to fire the reader with a desire to continue such exercises himself. Above all, to remind him that no Christian question can be clarified or elucidated unless in faith. And yet is round and beautiful.

Criteria

What is clouded and confused can only be clarified by discernment. Where, however, what is to be discerned is of final, ultimate importance, where we are concerned with the being and non-being of man before God, who would be bold enough to make distinctions there unless in the Holy Spirit? This is a sharp, cutting wind which can set our teeth chattering. And it is also a scorching fire which would sear out the brain of many a man if it descended on him as tongues of fire. And who will so overreach himself as to claim that he has the Spirit? Parties cannot lay claim to him for themselves; he sweeps through proposition and counter-proposition. Defenders of tradition may be parched and spiritless; defenders of progressiveness may march on into empty spaces. No one group can capture the heavenly dove for itself. It comes and goes. It descends, but it does not settle. The tumult of the spirit storms where it will. Is this, then, merely the arbitrary exercise of the divine will, beyond all our confused and embittered struggles for faith, for the Church, for Christian existence? Does our despair not trouble him? But how would he then be the Spirit who with unutterable groaning sighs from within our hearts? And if he who is sharper than any two-edged sword pierces us until he has divided soul and spirit, joint and marrow one from the other, should we think of him more as a butcher or perhaps more as an experienced surgeon who can cut so deep only because of his responsibility and skill? Are we simply the objects on which he works, or does he not perhaps also teach us something of his skill? Paul at least maintains that we have received the Spirit which is from God and continues; The purely natural man does not understand what is of the Spirit of God. It is for him as folly and he cannot understand it because it must be understood spiritually. The spiritual man on the other hand judges all, whereas he himself is judged by no man. ‘For who knows the mind of the Lord that he might be able to teach him?’ We however possess the Spirit of Christ. Great words, high claims. But what here appears as a claim stands in the gospel as a demand, a demand that we should interpret signs and discern spirits. The Spirit of Christ: that is a clue which may help us to understand this freely blowing, indomitable Spirit. Here criteria are sensed, criteria to indicate whether the Spirit moves in a man, empowering him to clarify what is unclarified.

If the Spirit descended on Jesus at his humiliation in the baptism of sinners in the Jordan, then this means that one cannot gain possession of the dove by reaching up to the skies. The Spirit reaches out to us, not we to him. And he descends where he finds room, readiness, listening, recognition, and acceptance. The less resistance he finds from preconceived views, ready-made systems, categorical principles, definitive plans, the more clearly he can express himself, the more clearly he can discern. And thus he lends to us something of his power to discern; we receive a share of his criteria. There are four which we might list, but which are only different sides of the same thing: namely, of the Spirit, who as fire, tumult, and sword makes his discernment by himself. In the humiliation of the critical reason he raises our spirit up to the place where, as Lord of the whole, he judges the parts.

1. He who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but he who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true and in him there is no falsehood (Jn 7:18 RSV). An alternative which allows for no in-betweens and so provides a sharp criterion. Christians who from their baptism have received a sense for the language of the Spirit, even non-Christians who know what it is to carry out a positive task, may use it. Indeed, they are often in the process of doing precisely that when the other spirit throws dust into their eyes, with the consequence that they overlook what is most blatantly obvious. A name, something which is going to gain publicity, something which seems modern, stands in their way and distorts such a simple view of things. Take, for example, a preacher or a professor of theology: Is it really so very difficult to distinguish whether he is seeking his own honor or the honor of him who has sent him? You can smell the pride which seeks its own honor; as is well known, it stinks. Or has our modern sense of smell become so entirely dulled that we no longer have any sense organ which can detect this most powerful and unpleasant of all scents? The human spirit can be developed in two directions. In the one it offers its help without consideration of self and takes its place among the ranks of those who wish to shift the great burden of the commonplace, at least at one small point. In the other it seeks to dominate, under the pretext of carrying things a stage farther; the voice becomes commanding, the language magical, the gestures compelling, the thought sweeps you along. It is precisely this element of violence in all its forms—from the violent enthusiasm which it engenders to the violent disruptions which it creates—which enables one to recognize this spirit. The breast is puffed out. A great wave of popular enthusiasm raises its head. The lecture hall thunders